Album by Planet Cheat Code
Humans Capable of Hurting has a clever double meaning: people can hurt each other. People can get hurt.
The album explores that idea on both a personal level and a much larger one, from emotional pain to the damage caused by people in positions of power.
There’s a lot going on here. It’s funny, sad, smart, catchy, strange, challenging and occasionally pretty damn depressing.
Planet Cheat Code seems to have strong feelings on just about everything: love, politics, technology, economics, loneliness, relationships, anxiety and the general weirdness of trying to be a person living in 2026.
The music is just as hard to pin down. There’s indie rock, acoustic folk, lo-fi, psychedelic pop, electronic music and plenty of songs that seem to wander into their own little worlds.
Sometimes it sounds like a scruffy one-person bedroom recording. Other times there are layers of instruments and vocals that make the songs feel surprisingly expansive.
Listening to Humans Capable of Hurting reminded me of songs from Robyn Hitchcock’s Eye. There’s something about that one-person-show feeling, where acoustic songwriting and strong pop melodies are surrounded by psychedelic textures and stranger ideas. There’s also a little Lou Reed in the vocal phrasing, and occasionally Planet Cheat Code brought David Bowie to mind.
“Humans Capable of Hurting” is a beautiful, gentle acoustic opener about someone whose pain gets lost among the suffering of everyone around them.
There’s a circus-like psychedelic quality to “The Socialist Queen of the City,” almost like a distorted music box. It creates this strange world of imagined perfection where even a supposedly ideal society can’t solve the messy emotional problems of being a person.
I really like the melody on “Easy on the Eyes.” It’s beautiful acoustic alternative rock with a folky quality, and the abstract lyrics give the whole thing a lonely feeling. The narrator seems to want love and connection without really knowing what he needs from another person.
“Wartime Pavilion” gets much fuzzier and more electric, creating a bizarre story about fascism, media, newspapers and producers turning something horrible into a spectacle.
Acoustic guitar and an almost organ-like synth give “You Can’t Tell Us What to Do” a more recognizable song structure, while the lyrics take aim at people in positions of power and privilege.
One of the most fun songs here, “Billionaire Blues” is upbeat and piano-driven, with an almost bluesy quality and a theatrical, slightly off-kilter keyboard sound. It’s funny, biting and sardonic before eventually revealing the anger underneath.
The prettiness of “The Sky’s on Fire” doesn’t last. It starts with acoustic guitar that made me think of early 60s Beatles. Then things get fuzzy, the vocals pile up and everything starts spiraling into something much uglier.
The acoustic beginning of “Will This Feeling Ever Pass?” feels mournful and vulnerable before the song dissolves into fuzz and distortion. That shift works beautifully with its portrait of having powerful feelings for someone who doesn’t return them.
“Prime Suspect (Suspected Primarily)” is the album’s big epic. It begins with a slow drum-machine beat, gentle acoustic guitar and an almost monotone vocal. The music gradually fills out, with bigger drums, fuller guitars and vocals that become more urgent. Then two vocal parts compete for space before everything drops away and a keyboard starts hammering at the same chord over increasingly frantic vocals. Eventually even that disappears and the song settles back into piano.
The lyrics are just as unsettled. There’s death, anxiety, self-loathing, unfulfilled dreams and the feeling of being trapped inside your own head. But by the end, there is some sense of resilience.
“Come On Down From Space” is much more restrained. It feels like a lifeline being thrown to someone hiding real pain behind a positive veneer. It starts as gentle acoustic folk before gradually expanding, with synths creating an almost orchestral atmosphere. It’s a really pretty song.
“Let’s Just Believe” closes the album with a stark piano arrangement. The lyrics become abstract and almost collage-like, touching on many of the ideas that run through the album. It feels less like a song with one clear answer than a collection of anxieties and hopes being laid out on the table.
Humans Capable of Hurting feels like an album trying to make sense of a pretty confusing time to be alive. It’s smart, catchy, challenging, sad, funny and frustrated. It covers an enormous amount of ground — indie rock, folk, psychedelic pop, electronic music and more — but underneath all those different sounds and ideas is a pretty simple feeling: we’re all trying to figure out how to live with ourselves, with each other and with the world we’re stuck in.
Verdict: Good
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